Low code AI with Power Apps and Power Automate
Power Apps 및 Power Automate를 사용한 로우 코드 AI
Microsoft의 AI Builder는 Power Apps 및 Power Automate에 로우 코드 생성 AI 기능을 도입합니다.
미리보기 기능이 어떻게 쌓이는지 살펴보겠습니다.
Microsoft's AI Builder introduces low-code generative AI capabilities to Power Apps and Power Automate. Let's see how the preview features stack up.
Contributing Editor, InfoWorld | AUG 1, 2023 2:00 AM PDT
Low-code and no-code software development platforms were developed to enable so-called citizen makers (also known as power users and non-professional programmers) to create professional applications. But historically, such efforts often stalled without the participation of programmers and database administrators.
Low-code and no-code 소프트웨어 개발 플랫폼은 소위 시민제작자(파워사용자 및 비전문 프로그래머라고도 함)가 전문 응용 프로그램을 만들 수 있도록 개발되었습니다.
그러나 역사적으로 그러한 노력은 프로그래머와 데이터베이스 관리자의 참여 없이 중단되는 경우가 많았습니다.
Microsoft는 수십 년 동안 Excel로 돌아가서 이 문제를 해결해 왔습니다.
지난 몇 년 동안 Microsoft Azure의 AI 및 머신러닝 기능에 집중한 후, Azure 사용자가 ChatGPT/GPT-4를 사용할 수 있게 만든 OpenAI에 대한 대규모 투자 덕분에 회사는 이제 생성 AI를 믹스에 추가하고 있습니다.
Microsoft has been banging away at this problem for decades, going back to Excel. After focusing on AI and machine learning capabilities in Microsoft Azure for the past couple of years, the company is now adding generative AI to the mix, thanks to a large investment in OpenAI that has made ChatGPT/GPT-4 available to Azure users.
Power Apps 및 Power Automate의 AI 빌더
AI Builder in Power Apps and Power Automate
Microsoft는 최근 생성 AI 기능을 Power Apps 및 Power Automate의 AI Builder 섹션으로 접었습니다.
아래 그림에서 볼 수 있듯이 AI Builder는 Microsoft AI 스택의 최상위에 있으며 전문 개발자의 영역인 Azure AI Services에 있는 기능을 활용하고 Power Apps 및 Power Automate 내에서 시민 제작자가 사용할 수 있도록 합니다.
Microsoft recently folded generative AI capabilities into the AI Builder section of Power Apps and Power Automate. As you can see in the figure below, AI Builder is at the top of Microsoft’s AI stack, drawing on the capabilities present in Azure AI Services—the domain of professional developers—and making them available to citizen makers within Power Apps and Power Automate.
Microsoft의 AI 스택에는 3개의 계층이 있습니다.
Azure ML 플랫폼은 AI 모델을 구축하기 위한 것입니다.
Azure AI Services는 이러한 AI 모델의 기능을 사용하거나 사용자 지정해야 하는 전문 소프트웨어 개발자를 위한 것입니다.
AI 빌더를 통해 시민 제작자는 프로그래밍 경험 없이도 모델을 사용할 수 있습니다.
Microsoft’s AI Stack has three layers. The Azure ML Platform is for building AI models; Azure AI Services are for professional software developers who need to use or customize the functionality of those AI models; and AI builder lets citizen makers consume the models with no programming experience required.
Generating applications with Copilot
Copilot으로 애플리케이션 생성
Microsoft와 GitHub의 "부조종사" 브랜딩은 프로그래밍 편집기를 사용하는 한 쌍의 프로그래머 역할에만 적용되었을 때 이해가 되었습니다.
이제 Windows 11, Microsoft 365 및 Power Platform에 적용되므로 확신이 덜 듭니다.
그냥 마케팅 냄새가 난다.
Microsoft and GitHub’s “copilot” branding sort of made sense when it only applied to acting as a pair programmer using programming editors. Now that it applies to Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform, I’m less convinced. It just smells like marketing.
즉, Power Platform의 AI Copilot에는 애플리케이션 생성과 특정 흐름 또는 집중 작업에 GPT 사용이라는 2 가지 주요 사용 사례가 있습니다.
지금은 애플리케이션 생성에 집중하고 나중에 특수 GPT 흐름을 살펴보겠습니다.
That said, there are two major use cases for AI Copilot in Power Platform: generating applications and using GPT for specific flows or focused tasks. We’ll concentrate on application generation for now and look at specialized GPT flows later on.
The Power Apps home screen now offers a text-based “Let’s build an app” option at the top of the page, which uses GPT. To be able to see this currently, you have to enable the preview, wait, and possibly create a new development environment and refresh the screen a few times. If you want to revert to the old home screen, use the toggle on the top right side of the screen.
Power Apps 홈 화면은 이제 페이지 상단에 GPT를 사용하는 텍스트 기반 "앱을 빌드해봅시다" 옵션을 제공합니다.
현재 이것을 볼 수 있으려면 미리 보기를 활성화하고 기다려야 하며 가능하면 새로운 개발 환경을 만들고 화면을 몇 번 새로 고칩니다.
이전 홈 화면으로 되돌리려면 화면 오른쪽 상단의 토글을 사용하십시오.
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응용 프로그램 생성 프로세스는 눈에 보이는 것보다 적은 것 같습니다. 현재 "여기에 앱용 테이블이 있습니다" 화면으로 이동합니다.
이 전술은 Power Apps가 테이블에서 애플리케이션을 생성하는 방식과 일치합니다.
The application generation process seems to be less than meets the eye. At the moment, it takes you to a “Here’s a table for your app” screen. This tactic is consistent with the way Power Apps generates applications from tables.
The table screen shows a simple proposed table with a Copilot box at the right. Not all the suggestions shown on the lower left currently accomplish anything other than to regenerate the sample table. Merely clicking a suggestion currently does nothing. If you type “add more rows” in the Copilot text box, you will see a larger table, but the contents may change randomly—in my case, from school supplies to fruits.
The actual code generation happens after you click the Create app button on the lower right side of the screen.
Once you’ve generated the basic application, you can explore its screens and components and their properties, modify them as you wish, and add more data. You can navigate at both the left and bottom side of the screen, add and edit at the far left and top, and edit properties at the right.
If you navigate to the main screen, you will be able to change screen-wide properties such as the theme we’re changing here. Pressing the triangle at the top right allows you to preview the application.
The default app preview uses a web layout. The dropdowns at the top right allow you to choose different form factors.
The phone dropdown is in alphabetical order by brand, so of course it starts with Apple iPhone models. Farther down are Motorola, Samsung, and Xiaomi.
The iPhone previews include a shell image as well as the screen contents. The previews are dynamic and functional. This is a detail screen I got to from the scrolling list of items. Note the edit and delete icons at the top right.
In horizontal mode on a phone, the application displays the scrolling list in the left-hand column and the detail screen in the right-hand column.
The horizontal tablet preview gives you enough space to see the whole detail form as well as the scrolling list.
Power Apps prebuilt AI models
Power Apps currently offers 17 AI models that you can use to create flows to embed in applications. We'll look at each of them below.
The Power Apps AI models include processing for various kinds of documents, for example, invoices, receipts, and identity documents. They also include text generation, sentiment analysis, translation, and other text processing functions, as well as time series predictions.
Azure OpenAI Service / Text Generation / GPT (preview)
The “Create text, summarize documents, and more with GPT” preview service is the newest jewel of Power Apps. While a few of these capabilities duplicate other services, for example sentiment analysis, most of them are valuable additions to the Power Apps’ arsenal.
The sample templates are guides to prompts known to work with GPT. You’re not restricted to these capabilities, however: It’s not that hard to write a prompt from scratch.
Creating a model with the GPT service is essentially an exercise in prompt engineering, and the interface allows you to test your prompts on a variety of inputs. Here, I’ve used several paragraphs from my 2021 article on Azure AI and asked GPT to summarize the text. It did a fairly good job. Notice the instruction “without adding new information,” which is intended to keep GPT from bringing in material it has seen elsewhere, or worse, hallucinated.
Business card reader
The business card reader is one of the many AI Builder services that draw on Azure AI Services. More of these follow.
As you can see from the image, the business card reader performs OCR on business cards and both extracts and labels all the common fields.
Category classification (preview)
The category classification service reads text in any of seven languages and applies a prebuilt model to classify the customer feedback into predefined categories. The current categories are Issues, Compliment, Customer Service, Documentation, Price & Billing, and Staff.
Entity extraction
Entity extraction can use a prebuilt or custom model to extract entities from free text in any of seven languages. There are 25 supported entity types in the prebuilt model.
ID reader
The identity document reader prebuilt model extracts information from passports, US driver's licenses, US social security cards, and US green cards.
Invoice processing
Processing invoices requires handling tables of line items as well as global values.
Key phrase extraction
Key phrase extraction is a way to extract the main talking points from a free text document. Unlike an entity extraction model, key phrase extraction identifies whatever’s in the text rather than looking for specific words and phrases.
Language detection
Language detection is often the first stage of a text processing flow. Once you know the language of a document, you can go on to analyze its sentiment, extract key phrases, and translate it to another language.
Receipt processing
Like invoice processing, receipt processing has to handle lists of items as well as global values. Dealing with crumpled invoices is a common use case.
Sentiment analysis
Identifying the sentiment of text can be a useful way to control how the message should be processed further. Positive sentiment might flow into a queue of endorsements for use by marketing, while negative sentiment might trigger a response from customer service.
Text recognition
Text recognition is a generalized OCR process that tries to extract all the text from an image.
Text translation
The text translation model includes source language identification, so you don’t have to invoke that separately, although if you know the source language you can specify it to skip the detection step. This text translation is rated as “real-time” and is limited to 10,000 characters at a time.
AI Builder in SharePoint and Teams
The Microsoft Syntex service allows you to create AI Builder models in SharePoint. Syntex is a Microsoft 365 service that has even more text processing models than Power Apps.
To use AI Builder in Teams, install the Power Automate app in Teams. Then you can create flows to use from the AI Builder templates.
Conclusion
Microsoft now has an extensive set of low-code AI and ML capabilities built into the AI Builder section of Power Apps and Power Automate, currently on a preview basis. Microsoft’s competitors in this space aren’t sitting back and ignoring AI, however, and this snapshot won’t be the final word in the field.
Overall, Power Apps is shaping up to be a rather nice low-code development environment with the addition of the new AI and ML capabilities, although it’s certainly not there yet. While the combination of Power Automate flows, AI, and Power Apps seems a bit random at first glance, it could turn out to be a powerful combination.
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AI Builder in Power Apps and Power Automate
Microsoft now has an extensive set of low-code AI and ML capabilities built into the AI Builder section of Power Apps and Power Automate, currently on a preview basis. While the combination of Power Automate flows, AI, and Power Apps seems a bit random at first glance, it could turn out to be a powerful combination.
Martin Heller is a contributing editor and reviewer for InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from 1986 to 2010. More recently, he has served as VP of technology and education at Alpha Software and chairman and CEO at Tubifi.
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